I was in Kenton yesterday and was surprised to see Harrow council had already slapped poppies on lampposts. It's the first week of October, guys, what were you thinking?
The poppies were all along the shopping parades on Kenton Road, one per lamppost, but not on the Brent side because they're not kneejerk remembrance fetishists. The red flowers also bedecked two shopping parades in Queensbury, and are likely elsewhere but I wasn't on a deliberate scavenger hunt to spot them.
Admittedly Remembrance Sunday is the earliest it can be this year, but 8th November is still FIVE WEEKS AWAY and this premature bloom is entirely unnecessary. The Royal British Legion don't launch their appeal until 22nd October, their starting pistol always fired 17 days before the Cenotaph ceremony, whereas Harrow have gone for 34 days which is effectively Double Remembrance. Are they trying to get value for money for their flappy bits of red plastic, is the councillor in charge a super-patriot or did someone at the depot just get overexcited?
Remembrance started as a two minute silence, was extended to a week in which to buy a poppy and is now a full-on 2½ weeks of red-pinned expectation. But it doesn't need to become a five week campaign covering most of October, which isn't even the month associated with remembrance, just because some official thinks it important to turn Poppytide into a season rather than an event. Even TfL normally wait for the second half of October before slapping poppies on the front of hundreds of their trains, although they also often feel the need to jump the gun Legion-wise.
And don't get me started on how long it can take to remove the poppies afterwards, with some of these plastic poppies still in situ long after Christmas festivities should have taken over, becoming meaningless symbols rather than emblems of retrospection and respect. There is absolutely no need to extend a brief silence to several weeks of performative remembrance, it's pointless artificial virtue-signalling, because it's never disrespectful to wait to remember.
